Alphabet Roadtrip

Something Wonderful from Typographyshop

I have been meaning for awhile to write something here about Typographyshop.com, an online store that sells t-shirts you may not have known you were missing: fine, tasteful, funny designs about typography and advertising. I am not a person known to wear t-shirts with words on them. In fact I am not even a "t-shirt"-wearer. But Patrick King, chief designer and kerner at this enterprise won me over with the elegant black tanktops for women. I took my previous favorite to Mexico. People all over the Yucatan saw a woman wearing a shirt that said, "Everything is better in Bodoni." And, full of envy, they came up to me and said, (I kid you not,) "I've never been, is it beautiful?" I assured them it was, and that it was even more beautiful than Akumal, with bigger turtles.

Do take a look at the latest release, my new favorite, which bridges the hardcore world of very sans serif and the particularly zen seriflessness of the Japanese enso: "Counter," on pre-release sale until the end of April.

If you are coming to AlphabetRoadtrip from some other land, perhaps from a place where the letters have no parts and thus no names but simply emerge wholecloth as a set of pixels, this note from Patrick explains:

Counter is a new theme full of meaning far beyond the typographic. It elicited quite the discussion on our Facebook page.

Some designers and all non designers weren't familiar with the term "Counter," which among the many terms in typographic anatomy is perhaps the simplest to explain as any fully enclosed space within a letterform. Uppercase A, B, D, O, P, Q, R and lower case a, b, d, e, g, o, p, q and the numbers 4, 6, 8, 9 and 0 all contain counters. And let's not forget the & ampersand.

Or as I said to a type challenged friend, it's the hole in the letter.

What I like about Typography shop is not just the products and the complete coolness of everything they produce, but also the sense of community. Where else can you get involved as a focus group deciding just how to kern "Make the logo smaller?" (a greatest hits shirt, and if you are a graphic designer you have felt the pain.) Take a look, wear your shirt to a temple in Koyasan, and send in a photo!

Words & Pictures: Process for a Calligram Logo

Successfully melding words and images is a tricky design challenge, particularly when it involves a brassiere. Exactly how do you fit two unequally long words into two equal shapes? And how do you make it readable? And what style of bra? and are there ribbons???

This project for Woman Within was a lot of fun. The process started with pencils to solve basic pose and letterform style questions. Then I moved to tighter brush sketches and started mixing and matching elements to get to something that would read immediately as words, with just enough suggestion of "woman" to tell you what it was about.

Above, the final logo, before being vectorized.

Pause: Personal Typography from my Journal

Last week Christopher Hoff, one of our best plein air painters, passed away far too soon, too young, a huge shock to the community. I had fallen in love with his work, much of which is about the street, and which often featured the Walking Man and other signs that are part of my real and mental landscape. On Facebook and the blogosphere people have posted beautiful tributes, one of which is from Joey Veltcamp which you can read here.

Christopher's passing, and the equally sad passing of the fine calligrapher and font designer Teri Kahan has put me in a reflective mood about life in general. How quickly our days are consumed and how easy it is to lose track of what is important. Typography and lettering design are my job, but also my passion. I pulled out my journal to remind myself to stay on track. From Wayfinding:

 

 

 

© Iskra Johnson

Pages from this journal have been published in Martin Dawber's New Illustration with Type

Take a Look At Flow Magazine in Holland

You always wonder how the famous web serendipity thing works. Somehow Flow Magazine in Holland came across the UnFacebook Like Stickers and featured them on their website yesterday. The number of visits to my design website as a result of this have been astonishing. I browsed deeper into their site and found this wonderful image from Moma Propaganda with accompanying text from Flow. I have put the google translation of the page below. The correct translation is just fine, yes, these are perfectly well educated people and their English is about 1000 percent better than my Dutch, but the google translation in some ways says more about the whole feel of our modern/global relationship with the internet. I especially like  "Sometimes the feeling comes over me that I 'bad' busy. If the media reports about Facebook or Twitter goes, the tenor usually what I do poverty asset. "

From Sao Paolo Agency Moma Propaganda

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"Once we were not jumping. keep a blog, twitter, facebook. We are good at a leaf, but the rest, because we did not see the added value of. Meanwhile we are all about. For it is the combination platter with all those things makes it so fun. Direct comments from readers on things we write, we can not through the leaves, but on the Internet. That was last week Astrid very happy with all the sweet tweets and facebook and blog comments on her broken wrist (update: they must undergo surgery Friday) and we also found last week on the social site noticeboard pint rest. What another great discovery, pages full of beautiful, truly a virtual party there. Our freelancer Dorine wrote a story about social media (to be read in the next Flow - March 14 in the shop). She writes: "Sometimes the feeling comes over me that I 'bad' busy. If the media reports about Facebook or Twitter goes, the tenor usually what I do poverty asset. "She finished the article with a nice counter-voice:" Internet has given me much brought: an untold amount of inspiration that I gain through pint rest . com, handy and useful tips and offers I get if I had another place oproepje who has a good restaurant / recipe for chocolate cake / bike seat or phrase has to do with me at the flea market stand. The warmth of all the great comments after the birth when I proudly posted a picture of my child. "We agree, nothing no erosion of human touch all these social media, life is super cozy with much interaction! In the photo a funny campaign by the Portuguese agency 6B Estúdio / Moma Propaganda about new media.

*Note, I rarely if ever put images from other website on my own website unless I have contacted the website publisher first to ask permission. In this case since the topic is Facebook and virality and the above image has been posted many other places I think the producers at Moma this won't mind. And if they do, they can find me easily through...the social network.

Oh yes, and you can follow me on Facebook at the new Iskra Design Facebook Page.

Lettering Design for Book Covers: Contemporary Fiction

Here are samples of different ways contemporary script calligraphy can be integrated into book cover design. Most of these books are ongoing series, in which the hand lettered book title becomes part of the brand.

                                 

Casual, fun brush lettering integrated into the illustration

Monoline pen handwriting for Sophie Kinsella's "Shopaholic" series

 

Brush calligraphy that flows with the curves of the illustration          

                                    

Script as illustration, a visual pun

 

Contemporary brush script designed to play off of a font

                       

A long title treated as a text shape for Laurel House

Elegant contemporary pen calligraphy in two different styles

 

 

The Seattle Times Logo, Well Weathered Gothic

"Signs I Like" has been on a long vacation. But today I saw something I could not resist outside the Lighthouse coffee shop. I did the lettering for the Seattle Times masthead about twelve years ago, in association with Landor Seattle. Coincidentally the logo was featured in Logo Reviews a few days ago. The true test of a logo is how well does it stand the test of time? Here it is on a newspaper kiosk, rotated so you can compare it with the way it is used in the paper. I had nothing against that eagle, but I do like how abstract (and even more Gothic) this becomes without it. Perhaps someone liked it so much they tore it out to sew on their jeans:

My task was to look at every other Gothic newspaper masthead in America and come up with a subtle, very legible, fresh variation. Here is the before and after:

(I do not know who did the eagle, so unfortunately I can't credit them here.)

Masthead typography is uniquely challenging. Gothic is by its nature very difficult to read. It may look traditional and authoritative, but it is based on a completely zen principle: the space between letters and that magical yin/yang balance of darkness and light. This was a dream project. My father was publisher for eight years of the paper he started, The Auburn Citizen, which also had a Gothic masthead. This assignment connected me back through time to the long tradition of the small- town newspaper and work in the original public sphere. Websites, as convenient and up-to-the-minute as they are, do not age well; we will never admire their distressed and curling edges or how the wind transformed their serifs.

 See more typographic logotypes at Iskra Design.

Lettering Design For Book Covers: Fantasy Genre

 

Title design by Iskra, a mix of Gothic and Uncial pen calligraphy

                    

Drawn typographic lettering design by Iskra

Title and Author lettering design by Iskra

The Imajica letterforms were designed by me as a proprietary style to be used in Clive Barker's books over a period of time. They were then lifted and turned into a font for general use by another designer without my knowledge or permission, a perplexing and less than gallant appropriation of one artist's works by another.

See more book cover title lettering at Iskra Design.

Classic Calligraphic Lettering Styes for Romance Book Jackets

I do title and author design for many books by romance authors. These recent covers for Karen Robards and Danielle Steele are a good match of lettering style with other visual elements.

Title and author calligraphy by Iskra, Art Director Lisa Litwack

Title calligraphy and lettering design by Iskra, Art Director Lynn Andreozzi

Like, Like...... Love: The New UnFacebook "Like" Stickers from Iskra Design

 
© Iskra Design

To download the UnFacebook personalized "Like" stickers go to the pdf portfolio section at Iskra Design.

Watercolor and Ink Illustration from The Rollercoaster of Love

You have probably noticed that this is the month with the red heart in the middle, and you will be consuming flowers and chocolates at a frantic rate in advance if not on the Day. Of all consumer holidays, Valentines Day ranks as one of my favorites. It is built on true emotion and complicated sentiment, starting right in kindergarten when a child starts to wonder if the little SweeTart glued to a piece of constuction paper (from That Boy) "means" something.

I promise you something very interesting is coming to Alphabet Roadtrip on Valentines Day. But in the meantime, who doesn't love an amusement park? Especially one that has a little cafe called February where you can think about life and write in your journal. Croquill pen with India ink and watercolor.

© Iskra Design